In 1944, when France was liberated from the Nazis, its restored republic faced a dilemma. The normal process of law could not deal with the tens of thousands of public officials who had collaborated with the occupiers. So the French invented a new category of judicial chastisement: indignité nationale. It is generally translated as “national unworthiness” but “national indignity” has more of a ring to it. Those found guilty of it were recognised as bad citizens, unfit to hold office.
We too should have instituted the offence of indignité nationale. It would have saved us from the national indignity of having our new government formed by the grace and favour of Michael Lowry.
The third pillar of our republic’s government is to be the man who Fine Gael felt morally obliged to remove from ministerial office and from membership of the party “in keeping”, as its then leader (and taoiseach) Enda Kenny told the Dáil in 2011, “with the party’s desire to maintain probity and standards in politics”.
And the man who Fianna Fáil’s then (and present) leader Micheál Martin pronounced, in that debate on the findings of the Moriarty tribunal, unworthy of membership of the Dáil itself: “We ... believe that Deputy Lowry should consider his position and resign from Dáil Éireann.” Martin supported an all-party motion (passed unanimously) that “the Dáil believes the conduct of Michael Lowry set out in the tribunal report was completely unacceptable and calls on Deputy Lowry to resign voluntarily his membership of Dáil Éireann.”
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The modern history of the State is not remotely like that of occupied France. I am emphatically not suggesting any parallels between the behaviour of Michael Lowry or any other office holders in Ireland and those in the collaborationist Vichy regime. The parallel concerns, rather, the legal and political dilemma: what do we do with office holders who have brought shame on the republic?
In our case, the problem is impunity. From the 1990s onwards, it became unavoidably obvious that we had an embedded nexus of political corruption in both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The harm it did was characterised accurately by Kenny as “incalculable damage [that] has already been done because of a culture of ‘thanks very much, big fella’, walking-around money, whip-rounds, luck on the horses and a taoiseach degrading our nation and this office by trousering after-dinner tips. It is a culture typified by arrogant, mercenary and immoral politics that almost ruined our reputation and made a mockery of character itself. When that culture included business and banking it contaminated our country, divided our society and diminished our republic.”
Lowry is reliably transactional. He does deals and he delivers what he promises. So feck civic virtue
The problem is that this insult to our republic and the immense injury it inflicted on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary citizens was never expiated. The presiding deity of the kleptocracy, Charles Haughey, was wrapped in the Tricolour and given a State funeral. Very few of those responsible for the “incalculable damage” ever saw the inside of a courtroom, let alone of a jail cell.
We therefore have, albeit for vastly different reasons, something like the French postwar problem. The republic had been debased and demeaned. It needed at least a public gesture of revulsion, a mark of shame to be branded metaphorically on the foreheads of those who had behaved so shamelessly.
Lowry himself has never betrayed the slightest awareness of ignominy. “My conscience”, as he has put it, “is clear”. The tax amnesty he availed of washed away all his sins of omission in neglecting to pay what he owed to the Revenue. The findings of the Moriarty tribunal that he “not only influenced, but delivered, the result” of the supposedly independent competition for the State’s second mobile phone licence; that he engaged in a “cynical and venal abuse of office”; and that his conduct in relation to a rental property owned by Ben Dunne was “profoundly corrupt to a degree that was nothing short of breathtaking” – all of this is, as far as he is concerned, cruel calumny against a blameless man.
But not as far as his fiancés in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are concerned. Both parties are fully on the record as accepting these findings. Both parties believed that Lowry should be excluded from government, from the Dáil and from membership of a democratic political party, in order, as Kenny put it, to “rehabilitate the idea of civic virtue and the idea of the duty and nobility of public service”.
Yet there is apparently a statute of limitations on civic virtue. Lowry is now openly embraced as the power broker of the new government. He is the lead negotiator for the eight-strong Regional Group of Independents who will give Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil their governing majority.
Why is this okay? Because, as Simon Harris explains it, “you have to remember the public voted for Deputy Lowry in very large numbers in Tipperary”. This is self-serving nonsense: in 2011, when Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were condemning Lowry to the status of a political pariah, he had just received 14,104 votes in Tipperary North. In November 2024, he received 12,538 votes. If he was unfit for office when he got more votes why is he fit to be the kingmaker when he got fewer?
Of course, this has nothing to do with votes in Tipp North and everything to do with votes in the Dáil. Lowry is reliably transactional. He does deals and he delivers what he promises. So feck civic virtue.
And he has been proven to be prophetic. In 2011, when Micheál Martin was deeming him unfit to serve in the Dáil, Lowry predicted that “in regard to the kind of posturing practised by ... Deputy Martin, and his clean-cut, Steve Silvermint image, it will not be long before the wraps come off ... And when the wraps come off I do not think they will be smelling of mint for Deputy Martin or his party colleagues who were so anxious to condemn me.” The wraps are off now and the stale perfume of indignité nationale is once again in the air.